Come On Up

by jordi Nopca

  The first thing he noticed was an intense smell of shit. It could be coming from his left, where a man with a toad’s dewlap had gone in a few minutes earlier; he hadn’t caught his attention before, but right now he was revealing himself in all his monstrosity, more appropriate to a remote swamp than the basement of a cultural center with impeccable programming. The stench could also be the result of an intense discharge by the supposed Frenchman, who still hadn’t finished washing his hands. It could even be that that nauseating pong was being disseminated by Marina. Joan was surprised that someone would dare to go for a number two in such a context. He was surprised but at the same time intrigued to find out if it was Marina who was the tenacious one. He imagined that when they met up out front, at some point on the walk to the metro, they’d resume their interrupted conversation, and it would finally become clear if they were willing to move things along to the next level. Kissing. Hugging. Taking it further.

  Joan pissed as he thought about all that. The stall to his left was now empty. The man with the toad’s dewlap cleared his throat and left without washing his hands. They were sharing a moment of complete intimacy, as now only he and Marina were in the bathroom of Casa Àsia. They’d just watched Ba xing bao xi, a kooky comedy directed by Johnnie To. Marina was in her first year of biology. He was doing computer science. They’d been friends for two years, and they would probably very soon enter into the intriguing world of coupledom. Joan was now sure that he wanted to date her. He’d just made the decision after hearing his beloved Marina’s first arrogant, strident, trumpeting flatulence. Seconds later, it was accompanied by the emphatic cannonballing of an excrement he imagined to be of considerable proportions.

  SWISS ARMY KNIFE

  It wasn’t a long conversation, we didn’t know what else to say to each other.

  It was raining outside. I made myself some coffee, and read.

  —Peter Stamm, “In the Outer Suburbs”

  A few years ago, I joined that growing minority that fills up a suitcase as soon as vacation starts and heads out of the country. There, we while away our days visiting monuments, staring at shop windows with wide eyes, exploring landscapes far from the urban blight, and, perhaps paradoxically, spending an inordinate amount of time in public parks filled with joggers, parents out with their kids, dogs that look like sad second-rate demons, old folks dragging themselves around stiffly, and pathetic out-of-work men who sit with a can of beer in one hand. I don’t mind being called a tourist. For me, those trips are the cherry on top of the cake that is the rest of the year: the sweetest point, the exquisite, perfectly spherical treat left for the very last bite.

  Estrella and I had figured out a while ago that the summer isn’t the best time to travel. We save most of our vacation time for October or November, and in January or March, we take a few extra days. We plan our trips far enough in advance to get good prices on the plane tickets and often find sweet hotel deals. As soon as we’ve left Barcelona behind, everything weighing on us is lifted, our sight clears, and our ears open up: We’re ready for a few days of new discoveries, educational visits, and succulent meals. Just taking a bus can be a wonderful experience, if you’re in Poland. Having a beer is awesome when you’re sitting on a wooden bench in a Bavarian Brauerei. There are few things better than a guided tour of some old ruins. Being far from home stimulates us and improves our mood; it’s like a burst of oxygen to the brain.

  When we were in our early thirties, we would head off without much planning, preferring to be surprised by all the little details. In our forties, we discovered the virtues of guidebooks. Our addiction to them grew quickly: At first, we just used them to check an address or look at a map; over time, we began to follow their instructions with painstaking devotion. We couldn’t go to the airport without having studied the history, essential monuments, and hidden treasures of the country we were going to. This systematic approach made us realize that our trips would be even more productive if we were familiar with the cultural production of each destination before we got there. When we were almost fifty, Estrella and I started to read the literature of each country we were planning to visit. Before going to Istanbul, we read Orhan Pamuk, Perihan Maĝden, and Yaşar Kemal. We prepared for a quick jaunt to Trieste with novels by Italo Svevo and Giani Stuparich, as well as Il mio Carso, by Scipio Slataper—which we tried to read in Italian, with little success—and even a few essays by Claudio Magris. We didn’t learn much, but it further strengthened our travel bug. Before Finland, we had a ball with Arto Paasilinna and dipped into Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book without feeling the need to check out her work for children, and we would have happily tried the short story collections by Veikko Huovinen if we’d been able to get our hands on one. For Sardinia, we chose Grazia Deledda and Salvatore Satta, and that time we spent a weekend in Tallinn, we devoured The Czar’s Madman, by Jaan Kross, without understanding more than three lines in a row.

  Our most recent trip began at the end of last year, when Estrella came home with a novel by Peter Stamm.

  “He’s one of the most essential authors in the contemporary Swiss panorama,” she explained as I looked at the book with a furrowed brow.

  I remember thinking, slightly nervously, that Switzerland was one of the few European countries still on our to-do list.

  “Really?” I said. “Interesting.”

  I kept washing pans in the sink.

  Ever since we’d started reading literature, Estrella had begun to use new words and expressions, which would rub off on me, and then I’d use them at work. Sometimes, when I was trying to convince some bar owner to upgrade the old coffeepot that he’d been using for four decades with one of the latest models from our company—which would last him ten years, tops—I would let loose with “Listen, in today’s panorama, you have to keep up with the latest tools.”

  The bar owner got scared and said he wasn’t interested. I went to my car, disappointed, and hid the book I was reading under the seat. But I pulled it back out just a few hours later, once I had put the feeling of failure behind me by selling one of my coffeepots.

  Estrella’s showing up with Peter Stamm’s novel was the first sign of a proposal that it took her a few more days to formulate. “I was thinking we could go to Switzerland,” she said. “This book is pure deliquescence, Octavi.”

  Estrella rarely spoke my name. I sensed that her reading was so rewarding that, one afternoon when I’d managed to sell three coffeepots, I went into the same bookstore where Estrella had bought Stamm’s novel and I had a gander at his literary output. I was lucky enough to find a bookseller who’d discovered the author three years earlier and devoured everything he’d written. She had even learned German just to read the part of his oeuvre that hadn’t been translated into Catalan or even Spanish: his plays and his stories for children.

  “Kids here just read Emili Teixidor and Jordi Sierra i Fabra. It’s a crying shame,” she said.

  Both names rang a bell, and instead of just nodding in agreement, I added a word of support.

  “Undoubtedly.”

  The bookseller recommended Black Ice, Stamm’s first short story collection.

  “I’d prefer a novel,” I told her. “I find stories too pretentious and convoluted.”

  My comment deflated her so much that I ended up buying Black Ice.

  “I promise you won’t be disappointed,” she insisted as she walked me to the register.

  She was wrong. Stamm’s stories left me pretty cold. I read them secretly at night, when Estrella was already asleep and our apartment became a vast coffin, where even the sound of scratching your head with one finger echoed with a hint of cosmic mystery.

  “How are you enjoying the book?” I would ask her every once in a while.

  I was expecting a response that would reaffirm my assessment, but Estrella’s praise was never-ending, until one day, when she was just thirty pages from the end of the novel, she said, “Peter Stamm is just so good … if I were younger, I’d fall i
n love with him.”

  That night, when Estrella had switched off the light, I went to the study and pulled Black Ice out of its hiding spot. I read the jacket flap over and over again: “Peter Stamm (Weinfelden, 1963) studied English language and literature, psychopathology, and computer science in Zurich. He has lived for long periods in Paris, New York, and Scandinavia. He has been writing since 1990. He is the author of one play and a regular contributor to radio and television. Since 1997 he has written for the literary magazine Entwürfe für Literatur. This is his second book.”

  Stamm was only four years younger than Estrella, and seven years younger than I. It took me longer than usual to fall asleep that night, and when I did, I had nightmares starring the writer and my wife. They were copulating in Swiss parks, surrounded by those cows with purple spots from the wrappers of that popular brand of chocolate.

  The image stayed with me for several days. I missed a lot of opportunities to sell coffeepots, I started taking sleeping pills without a prescription, and for the first time in a long while I considered visiting Dr. Ibars, my psychologist. But instead of placing myself in the hands of a professional, I decided to go to another bookstore and buy—this time, I wouldn’t be deterred—a Peter Stamm novel.

  “Seven Years is very good,” the bookseller told me.

  “I already have that one,” I replied, thinking of the phrase Estrella had used to define it: “pure deliquescence.” “It didn’t do much for me.”

  “What about this one?”

  She pointed to the Spanish translation of Black Ice.

  “Nah, not my cup of tea.”

  “So why don’t you try a different author?”

  I was convinced to soldier on with Stamm, so I bought Unformed Landscape. The first thing I did was look for the author’s bio and read it. The text had only a slight variation from the one on the story collection, which was tacked on at the end: “Recognized as one of the most important voices in new German prose, Quaderns Crema has already published Agnes (1998)—his first novel—and the book of stories Black Ice (1999).” Beneath that was the same photo: a portrait of the author in a kitchen, looking at the camera with an expression somewhere between suspicious and annoyed. He had bags under his eyes, a scowl on his lips, and an unobtrusive nose. He wore a wrinkled shirt. His hair was slightly mussed.

  I enjoyed the novel quite a bit. I liked the main character, a quiet customs officer with a son, and the setting, a town in the north of Norway that I had no trouble imagining, thanks to a trip Estrella and I had made ten years back. We had seen a bunch of towns like that one: a handful of houses by the sea, filled with grumpy fishermen; a bar with two men sitting alone drinking beers; serene, solid churches dominating the landscape.

  One night, after dinner, I showed Unformed Landscape to Estrella.

  “I bought it a few days ago. It’s really good,” I told her.

  Estrella grabbed it, looked closely at the illustration on the cover—a somber tree with a thick web of branches—and then read the jacket copy.

  “Stamm is coming to Barcelona soon to give a talk,” she mentioned before handing me back the book.

  “Do you want to go?”

  She didn’t answer, but I knew she did. His talk was on Wednesday, November 2. I made sure to finish my visits a bit early, picked up Estrella from the law firm where she worked, and took her to the Center for Contemporary Culture. We arrived there early to get good seats. When the event began, the place was packed, and the editor, in an impeccable suit, was obviously pleased to see that so many people had chosen good literature. Stamm was sitting in an egg-shaped chair. Behind him was a large window that revealed the outline of the city and a sky laden with clouds.

  Since I hadn’t had the time or the inclination to read Seven Years, the novel that Stamm was promoting, I didn’t pay attention to what he said during most of the event. The insipid questions from the interviewer, a guy who looked like a TV anchor, didn’t help me focus. Nor did the simultaneous translation, which was stilted and sometimes incomprehensible. There were only a few minutes where I managed to get past all those obstacles and process the answers from the author, who was explaining how he often wrote on trains.

  “In Switzerland, you can buy an annual pass that lets you travel very cheaply,” he explained. “Sometimes I take a train just to write, and I spend two or three hours working. In fact, a lot of writers do that in my country.”

  The interviewer praised his strategy. “Writing on the train is a good technique for saving money. That way, you don’t need an office.”

  Stamm tried to smile but didn’t quite pull it off. Not then and not later, when he explained that he was most comfortable working at home. Shortly after that, the man who looked like a TV anchor asked him if he wrote gruesome stories because he was a normal person.

  “I like to write, and it doesn’t always come easily to me,” he said. “I work for four or five hours a day, and then I go pick up my daughters from school. Over the years I’ve shelved a lot of stories and a few novels. Maybe that’s why I keep writing: because I never know if what I’m working on will make it into bookstores or end up unfinished. Have you ever wondered how many literary corpses there are in every writer’s desk drawer?”

  I had to go to the bathroom right as the event was ending, and when I came back, I noticed a table where a young woman was selling all of Stamm’s books.

  “Have you read this?” I asked her, pointing to the latest novel.

  She shook her head. “It’s on my pile,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  I headed back to the room where the event was being held without giving her the chance to praise the author’s vast talent. It was already over. At first, I thought that Estrella had left without me. I glanced around quickly and found her in line to get a book signed by Stamm.

  I waited for her, not letting her out of my sight. The author greeted her by raising his right hand in a languid, minimal gesture. She smiled and told him her name. As Stamm was signing her copy, Estrella said something to him—a long sentence, garbled by her treacherous nerves. The only response she got was his handing over the novel with an incomprehensible, uninspired scribble.

  Obviously, I avoided commenting on their meeting and just took Estrella home. We ate a vacuum-sealed package of carpaccio and some crackers spread with pâté with fines herbes while we talked about our trip to Switzerland, which we were planning to make in about six months’ time.

  “We should probably go before Easter Week, don’t you think?” I asked.

  “Before or after. If we go after, it’ll have to be the last couple of weeks of April.”

  “Palm Sunday is late this year?”

  “April first.”

  After dinner and fifteen minutes of reading—Estrella had just started Homo Faber, by Max Frisch (Zurich, 1911–1991)—I tried to get a little sexual attention. I had no hopes of getting to penetration—at most, masturbating Estrella with a small object or some oral depravity on her part. But she wasn’t in the mood to play. All I got were a couple of devastating rebuffs that forced me to push back my bedtime, and as a result I ended up watching an Italian game show with the volume practically on mute and paying extra-special attention to the hostesses’ breasts and shiny manes of hair.

  I let a few weeks pass before braving a bookstore. When I had my mind made up, I chose a different chain and business model: I walked through a large mall and then entered a store devoted to culture and audio equipment—a rather odd pairing—and, once I had found the book section, I approached the salesgirl who seemed the youngest.

  “What Swiss book do you recommend?”

  The girl looked me up and down—my thin mustache, shiny bald pate, leather briefcase, scrupulously polished shoes—and answered me with another question.

  “What author did you say you were looking for?”

  “None in particular. But the author has to be Swiss.”

  She typed something into her computer, and a few seconds later somethin
g else. That wasn’t enough. She required a third and fourth attempt before coming up with a coherent answer.

  “What about … Heidi?”

  “Heidi?”

  I felt a humiliating warmth bloom on my forehead.

  “Yes.”

  “You mean that story about the little girl, the goats, and Mrs. Rottenmeier?”

  All of a sudden, my forehead had become a vestigial but highly active appendix to hell. She was still talking.

  “I have it in Spanish and in English. There’s also a manga version.”

  “I’m interested in a recommendation for adults, if you have one.”

  The salesgirl didn’t understand me, or was a very good actress. She thanked me and waved me off before turning around and disappearing behind a door I hadn’t noticed until then. Since there were no other customers or workers nearby, I went to the other side of the counter and tried to find some Swiss literature for adults, using the same computer program the girl had, but I didn’t come up with anything, either.

  When I got back home, I turned on the computer and looked for Swiss authors on Google. I found a name that inspired confidence: Hermann Hesse. Born in a small town in the German Black Forest in 1877, Hesse moved to Basel (Switzerland) four years later with his family. Later, Hesse became a bookseller in Tübingen, had experiences of great spiritual value in India, and married Maria Bernoulli, the schizophrenic daughter of illustrious mathematicians. In 1946, they awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature. All his life he maintained double nationality, German and Swiss. According to the biographical profile I read, his essential novels were, in order of importance, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Demian, all three published before the 1930s. With the exception of the obligatory reading during my school days under the dictatorship, I couldn’t remember having read a book that old since Le Cousin Pons, by Honoré de Balzac, before a quick trip we were planning to Paris. We didn’t end up going, but I have a fond memory of the novel. Maybe at some point I should consider diving into the literature of the nineteenth century.